Options For Income is a contributor page created by the editors of Stock Options Channel, a stock options research Website. Our site includes a number of features that allow investors to dig deeper into interesting stock options opportunities, including our proprietary YieldBoost ranking system. Some of these actionable ideas will appear on this Forbes contributor page each day.
The site and our articles focus on selling option contracts and collecting premium income in the hope that they won’t be exercised and thus will expire worthless. It’s an income generating strategy currently employed by many of the most sophisticated money managers and hedge funds. Now StocksOptionsChannel.com and Forbes offer this information in an easy to use and understand format.

The put contract our YieldBoost algorithm identified as particularly interesting, is at the $65 strike, which has a bid at the time of this writing of $3.30. Collecting that bid as the premium represents a 5.1% return against the $65 commitment, or a 2.3% annualized rate of return (at Stock Options Channel we call this the YieldBoost).

Selling a put does not give an investor access to WMT’s upside potential the way owning shares would, because the put seller only ends up owning shares in the scenario where the contract is exercised. So unless Wal-Mart Stores, Inc. sees its shares fall 17.6% and the contract is exercised (resulting in a cost basis of $61.70 per share before broker commissions, subtracting the $3.30 from $65), the only upside to the put seller is from collecting that premium for the 2.3% annualized rate of return.

Turning to the other side of the option chain, we highlight one call contract of particular interest for the January 2016 expiration, for shareholders of Wal-Mart Stores, Inc. (NYSE: WMT) looking to boost their income beyond the stock’s 2.4% annualized dividend yield. Selling the covered call at the $90 strike and collecting the premium based on the $2.11 bid, annualizes to an additional 1.2% rate of return against the current stock price (this is what we at Stock Options Channel refer to as the YieldBoost), for a total of 3.6% annualized rate in the scenario where the stock is not called away. Any upside above $90 would be lost if the stock rises there and is called away, but WMT shares would have to advance 14.1% from current levels for that to occur, meaning that in the scenario where the stock is called, the shareholder has earned a 16.7% return from this trading level, in addition to any dividends collected before the stock was called.

The chart below shows the trailing twelve month trading history for Wal-Mart Stores, Inc., highlighting in green where the $65 strike is located relative to that history, and highlighting the $90 strike in red:

The chart above, and the stock’s historical volatility, can be a helpful guide in combination with fundamental analysis to judge whether selling the January 2016 put or call options highlighted in this article deliver a rate of return that represents good reward for the risks. We calculate the trailing twelve month volatility for Wal-Mart Stores, Inc. (considering the last 251 trading day closing values as well as today’s price of $78.92) to be 14%.

In mid-afternoon trading on Monday, the put volume among S&P 500 components was 665,891 contracts, with call volume at 1.31M, for a put:call ratio of 0.51 so far for the day. Compared to the long-term median put:call ratio of .65, that represents very high call volume relative to puts; in other words, buyers are preferring calls in options trading so far today.Find out which 15 call and put options traders are talking about today.

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